THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: THE PORTRAYAL

OF INDO-PAK CULTURE IN ZULFIKAR GHOSE’S

CONFESSIONS OF A NATIVE-ALIEN


Asma Aftab
ABSTRACT
The article seeks to present a critical reading of the cultural portrayal of Zulfikar
Ghose’s memoir Confessions of a Native-Alien. The reading of the text is
informed by the theoretical perspective of Edward Said for whom the migrant
intellectual’s cultural representation not reflective of the actual reality of the
indigenous culture and is essentially colored with western prejudices about
natives’ backwardness. Far from being a sympathetic insider who describes and
explains the native culture with empathy and intimacy, Ghose’s narrative is a
distant and lifeless repetition of some of his memories and events related with
his immediate family and community. Instead of showing his connection with
his past and collective community in a meaningful way, his cultural
representation reduces the complex diversity of his native culture into a
stereotypical description of what Said has termed as a “living tableau of
queerness” with no life and overflowing energy. The cultural portrayal that
emerges out of Ghose’s memoir obfuscates more than it reveals the true nature
and essence of a particular community in a wholesome way and does not
enhance or improve our understanding of Indo-Pakistan culture by engendering
cross-cultural understanding.
Key Words: Stereotyping, Orientalism, cultural representation, discursive
reality, empathy, cross-cultural understanding, Pakistani Literature in
English
INTRODUCTION
In the introduction of Waterman’s recent work on Pakistani English
literature, Shamsiehas credited Pakistani English writers for
“challeng[ing] … the stereotypes perpetuated in the West” about their
people, culture and community (Waterman, 2015, p.xi). Shamsie’s
observation is not reflective of the actual terms of representation with
which Indo-Pakistani culture and society have been presented by
mainstream Pakistani writers in English. Far from engaging in a
productive and complex task of questioning the stereotypes about their
people as backward, extremist and violent and presenting a better image
of their culture, the Pakistani English writers, including Ghose, have
been instrumental in perpetuating these stereotypes, alleging the
traditional Pakistani culture with violence, misogyny and inhumanity.

Lecturer in English, Government College University Faisalabad, Ph.D Candidate
NUML Islamabad
 Through A Glass Darkly: The Portrayal Of Indo-Pak Culture In Zulfikar 205

Among the pioneering writers of Pakistani English literature, whether it

is Suleri (1989) for whom the very existence of women in Pakistan is
synonymous with absence and non-existence, or Aslam (2004) as a
contemporary voice, the cultural presentation of Pakistan is ubiquitously
negative and malignant with its stultifying and suffocating traditions or
spectacles of violence and abuse against women and others marginalized.
Far from questioning and dismantling the stereotypes about their people
and society, these literary and discursive accounts have further
strengthened and reinforced them with their stamp of validity. Since the
knowledge is coming from the horse’s mouth, the so-called insider’s
perspective – it is hardly questionable in terms of its legitimacy.
In the present article, I have discussed the peculiar portrayal of Indo-
Pakistani culture in the autobiographical memoir of Zulfikar Ghose
(1965) Confessions of a Native-Alien. It is important to mention that
despite the general cataloging of Ghose among the pioneers of Pakistani
English literature, his relationship has remained elusive and ambivalent
with the land of his birth1 – Pakistan as well as India where he spent the
early years of his adolescence and youth before migrating to England.2
Ghose’s identity as a Pakistani writer is further problematized in the
wake of his loud and repeated expression of dissociation, detachment and
distance from all barriers and boundaries, be they geographical,
ideological or nationalist (Abbasi, 2011, p.114). Notwithstanding, what
qualifies him as a Pakistani English writer is the sole fact of his being
born in a Pakistani city Sialkot, whereas his literary and subjective
predilections situate him more in line with his western/American identity
and worldview.
Distant and Detached Portrayal of Culture
In Confessions, one does not find any sense of belonging and
indebtedness on the part of Ghose towards his native culture. This is
most evident in parts of his memoir where he gives vent to his emotional
and psychological distance from many aspects of his family, community
and collective culture. At innumerable points, this distant and detached

2
Tariq Rahman and Claire Chambers in their separate discussions on Ghose have
argued the same in terms of his subjective identity and association with Pakistan
and India to the extent that according to Chamber, Ghose has “left out of the
Pakistani group due to his “wavy links to Pakistan”(as cited in Waterman, 2015,
p.2).
206 Journal of Social Sciences
outlook is culminated into a sheer lack of affinity and association for the
collective norms and traditions of Pakistani culture, demonstrating that
he is not at all “integrated with his people” with home he “maintains an
outsider’s relationship”(Fanon, 2004, p.159). Even in recollecting and
recalling his past days and childhood memories in Pakistan and India, his
voice is devoid of any association and belonging and remains obviously
distant and detached. In the chapter Native Abroad II, Ghose comments
on various aspects of the traditional family system in Indo-Pak culture
where a man does not marry a woman but the entire family (p.137), and
where love marriages are not allowed by parents since “arranged
marriages involve substantial material gain to the young man” (p.35). His
own love affair with a Catholic girl Heather did not last as the traditional
Indian culture does not “permit lovers of differing religions”(p.35).
In describing his childhood memories, he comments, quite
distastefully, on the complex web of relations in the extended family
system of Pakistan where he was born and raised as a child. His
description unambiguously reflects his disapproval and distance from the
essence of his culture where one man usually the “eldest male” is
enormously burdened – far greater than in any other culture of the world
– to “ensure the existence of the other members of the family” (p.2). For
this, he is expected to “stretch his hundred-odd rupees a month to feed
and clothe some twenty members of the clan” (p.2) – something that
Ghose does not approve in case of his own father. He refers to his
personal experience of being part of a family that was “living on one
man’s brain and seven men’s hard work” and criticizes the extended
family system where there is “no scope for individualistic gestures”
(pp.49-50). Thus in referring to his extended family in Pakistan, he does
not mention the feelings of love, sympathy and sacrifice with which the
family members were connected and united with one another. Instead, he
criticizes his uncles and aunts who were all dependent on his father for
their livelihood and felt relieved when his father decided to migrate to
England as nobody from his extended family in Sialkot could now
“intrude on [their] prosperity” (p.72).
On a related note, Ghose’s description about his large family can be
contrasted with the subjective outlook of the African writer Nugugi
(1986) who valorizes his childhood as being one of twenty-eight children
in the extended family, raised with a mixture of Gikuyu traditional
 Through A Glass Darkly: The Portrayal Of Indo-Pak Culture In Zulfikar 207

customs and Christian values. This extended family with its web of
relations and associations connects Nugugiso strongly with the values
and norms of his family and tribe and furnishes him with a perspective
where past is characterized with “dignity, glory and sobriety” (Fanon,
2004, p.148). However, contrary to this perspective, Ghose disapproves
and criticizes Eastern culture for its strict parental control and the rigid
views of the elders and narrates her grandmother’s resentment that she
shows against her son’s decision of joining army by fasting and sitting
for long hours in the sun, showing her “hurt physically with an aura of
self-humiliation for those around her to be hurt and humiliated in
accepting her rigid views” (p.17).
Stereotypical Portrayal of Indian Culture
Ghose’s sense of alienation and distance from the traditional aspects of
his native culture engenders a discourse by creating certain stereotypes
about Indian people with their weather, wickedness and weakness of
mind. At times this becomes so explicit that while reading his memoir it
seems as if one were reading some Orientalist tale with its so-called cult
of nativity – marked with natives’ ignorance, filth and debauchery. In his
preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the French existentialist
philosopher Sartre has analyzed so succinctly how the colonial rule has
constructed the colonized subject by
breaking him in halfway. The result: neither man nor beast, but
the “native”. Beaten, underfed, sick, and frightened, but only up
to certain point, yellow, black, or white he always has the same
character traits – lazy, sly, and thieving who lives on nothing and
understands only the language of violence. (2004, p.l, italics
mine)
In line with Sartre’s argument, Ghose constructs a native subject who
is defined and determined with certain stereotypes and myths about his
subjective and cultural identity. During his visit to India and Pakistan as
a sports journalist he comments on the so-called Indian ways which are
stamped with his explicit disapproval and distance. He describes an
Indian man who “sleeps in the heat, his stomach covered in, his face
turned to the dust, an arm stretched out, the hand in the dust” as being a
Indian “he has nowhere else to go [but] to the earth and one day he will
never rise from it” (p.139). Another typical stereotype that he often
associates with Indian culture is the superstitiousness of its people,
208 Journal of Social Sciences
showing them as weak-minded and psychologically frail. He compares
his parents’ religious belief which they exhibited during an earthquake
with a primitive and pre-modern man who is “fretted at the sight of a
comet, wept during a hurricane, and prayed with dry lips during the
months of drought” by considering these as “afflictions…brought upon
himself by his own wrong deeds” (p.10). In a similar manner, he narrates
his childhood memory when his father was cursed by his grandmother
while he was lying in his bed and hearing the cross accusations which he
“would not want to hear again from a mother and son” (p.50). The effect
of his curse was considerably palpable on Ghose’s mother who due to
her “illiteracy and simplicity was terribly pessimistic” (p.156), believing
that “a curse from an elder member” is “a potent thing” that inevitably
brings with it “the gloom of imminent disaster” (p.50). As a corollary,
his description of his grandmother as a controlling cursing woman
willfully belies the kind, accommodating and usually-praying
grandmothers in the traditional family system of Pakistan, underscoring
his greater proclivity of mirroring a negative image of his culture by
excluding the positive side.
Having read his repeated references to the alleged sloth and greed of
Indian culture, one has the impression as if there were no greedier and
lazier people elsewhere but India – the bloody country where he has to
drink black coffee to keep himself awake (p. 137); and where “time
moves differently” as the “omnipresent sun encourages sloth” (p.127);
and where one “can belch, fart, spit” wherever one chooses to do so
without any internal or external restraint (p. 60). Besides their weather,
hygiene and sloth, another stereotype that he creates about Indians is
what he terms as the “fatalistic acceptance of sufferings, even of
inconvenience” which is an essential feature of their collective
consciousness(p.140). Thus he considers the Indians’ strange
temperament of resignation against all injustice and misery, no matter
how massive and unbearable, as if someone had learnt to “lie back and
enjoy” the rape since he could not stop it (p.140). The abject poverty of
India forces him to contemplate on the difference in class and status and
fills him with “bitterness” – but then this bitterness is nothing worth in
India than a “laugh, a loathsome laugh of a fat, cigar-smoking business-
man who has just been told a dirty joke” (p.139).
 Through A Glass Darkly: The Portrayal Of Indo-Pak Culture In Zulfikar 209

At many points in the narrative, Ghose seems to be contemptuous

about Indians’ love for money and materials, which like their
prototypical sloth, is a product of their culture as he says “the most
important thing in India is money and you should see how they make it”
(p.139), and remarks rather sarcastically “… and many Indians do
nothing else when they are not making money” (p.60). Another reference
to the materiality of Indian culture is made when he refers to his
grandparents’ two obsessions either “Allah or money” (p.135), and
declares rather sweepingly that the “major reason why people pray is that
they want more money” (p.131).
Whether it is the Hindu festival Devali which Ghose repels because of
its “material selfishness” (p.131) or the Indian newspapers embodying
the “native taste for an exaggerated, inaccurate vocabulary” (p.133), all
aspects of his native culture impart him a sense of emotional distance and
detachment, multiplying his feelings of alienation even in his apparent
nativity.2 It is quite ironical to see that the stereotypes that Ghose creates
about Indian people prove to be quite real in his own case when he was
given the role of the soothsayer in the performance of Julius Caesar
during his school in England because “the master thought that that was
the best part for an oriental” (p.68). Paradoxically, when he describes
Indians’ love for money, it is always in a negative light, but the same
love for pound note when it is described in the context of his father (p.
73) becomes admiring as denying the importance of money in t/his case
would be a blasphemy” (p. 80).
Religious and Sacred Aspects of Native Culture
In an attempt to absolutely ignore the spiritual and sacred side of Indians’
religiosity, Ghose comments on many people of his family by exhibiting
his explicit difference from the ways they practice their faith in their
mundane life. Thus his cousin who knew and remembered the whole
chapter of the Quran becomes a foil against his inability to read or
memorize anything in Arabic from the sacred text (p.7). More precisely,
while describing various aspects of the spiritual life of Indo-Pak culture,
Ghose fails to show any respect and regard for the vital significance of
religion in the construction of individual and collective subjectivity of his
people that he claims to represent in his writings. He gives a horrific
description of the ritual of circumcision by referring to his personal
experience in his childhood when his family forced him to undergo this
210 Journal of Social Sciences
against his will. There is a peculiar air in which he narrates the incident
with all its details, when he was “trapped like a cockerel” trying to avoid
the “moment of slaughter” by “screaming and raising hell and doing [his]
best to dodge out” against his uncles who were forcing him to “become a
Mussulman” (p.14). In a mixed sense of horror and sensation he
describes further details of the ritual which was done by the local barber
with the same “razor … he has shaved [his] head a year or so before”
(p.15). In many ways, his tone and voice not only situate him distant
from his cousin and entire folk around who were “damned
magnanimous” about the ritual but also embody his resentment “against
the first violence performed for cultural or religious reason” on a male
child in Pakistani culture (Waterman, 2015, p.135).
Here and elsewhere, the narrative becomes a replica of an orientalist
account with its frequent referencing of natives with their alleged or
actual corruption, debauchery and filth. He comments on the religious
faith of people living in the traditional Indo-Pak culture as if he no more
belongs to them. His presentation of the Indian Sadhu is fraught with the
characteristic stereotypes of an Orientalist tale and echoes the bizarre
extravaganza of an Eastern setting with its myth, mystery and mystique.
He describes the Indian Sadhu who was “absolutely naked, his body
smeared with ashes. His hair, long and knotted” touching his shoulders,
his “tongue hanging out of his mouth, had a spear pierced through it and
…was supporting the whole weight of the spear as well as bearing the
wound, the pain” (p.59). And then in a perfect mimicry of an Orientalist
Ghose calls him a man who with his “brisk pace” was “intent on
reaching a goal” but “despite the holy intention, despite the spiritual
quest, which no doubt burned in [his] breast was something of the
aimlessness of India” (p.59, Italics mine). In another instance, he narrates
his experience of visiting the sacred river of Ganges when he vents his
feelings of dislike for the religious devotion of Hindu worshippers taking
a “bodily plunge” in the river as the “culmination of [their] lifetime’s
ambition” but to Ghose it was the “foulest river in the world” (p.60) and
the Indians were bathing in it as:
…profligate despite the poverty, seeking a purification of the
soul and blind to the filth of the streets, hurrying despite the
inbred inertness that is the curse of the Indian body because of
the centuries of heat, urgently engaged in an activity which is as
 Through A Glass Darkly: The Portrayal Of Indo-Pak Culture In Zulfikar 211

uncreative as it is wasteful. This was India marching on with

heaven as its goal even though the road was mere dust (p.61,
italics mine).
Ghose’ voice in these lines is so obliviously denigrating and
stereotypical so as to echo and resemble the Orientalist stereotypes with
their bizarre mixture of natives’ spirituality and superstition; festivity and
filth and outer piety and inner corruption. In an extreme sense of
detachment and distance, Ghose singularizes him from the entire filthy
folk of India by looking around
with admiration and pity, with love and hate as one may handle a
jewel in a shop knowing that he can never purchase it, so that he
can both praise its beauty and denigrate the people who, he feels,
will abuse the preciousness of the object. (p.61, italics mine)
On a related note, this indifference and contempt that he feels for his
native culture and its collective ambience is sharply contrasted with the
Francophone intellectual and poet Cesaire, who on his return to his
native land, makes a passionate appeal to revive and reconnect him with
his soil, his people and their collective spirit: “[M]ake me the lover of
this unique people/make me commissioner of its blood/make me the
agent of its resentment (as cited in Kesteloot, 1995, p.169). Whereas
Ghose with his so-called rational self is unable to identify anything with
this atmosphere of whimsicality, magic and superstition, Cesaire does
not hesitate to identify and realign his subjective self with his land by
imbibing the “savage faith of the sorcerer” (as cited in Kesteloot, 1995,
p.169, italics mine). In Wilder’s view, Cesaire’s gesturing signifies his
complete immersion into his native culture combined with his conscious
distancing from western modes of consciousness with its so-called
“communicative rationality” and “conventional temporality” (2004,
p.40). However, Ghose’s distant and disdainful outlook against the
devout Indians and their “wasteful and uncreative” ways is emblematic
of his disrespect and indifference from the distinctive cultural essence of
a living community that he is associated against his will.
A Living Tableau of Queerness
It is very pertinent to compare Ghose’s presentation of his native culture
with another migrant writer V.S. Naipaul who presents a similar picture
of Indian people with their sloth, blackmailing and criminality combined
with their lust and fatalism (1964). In his remarkable analysis of the
212 Journal of Social Sciences
third-world migrant intellectuals (of which Ghose and Naipaul are
prominent names). Said (2002) analyzes how their literary and
intellectual projects are full of denunciation and disapproval for their
indigenous cultural norms and practices. The cumulative effect of such
discursive construction of stereotypes is that they turn the Orient into a
“living tableau of queerness” (Said, 1978, p.103).3 Thus Ghose is not
hesitant in describing the Pukhtun custom of eating lamb stew in a “large
port [that] one associates with cannibals” (p.13). Suffice to say that the
use of the word Cannibals signifies the essentially Eurocentric outlook of
Ghose and is reminiscent of the colonial logic that views natives in an
essentially dehumanized color with their “abased state of
being”(Ashcroft et al., 2000, p.31). According to Ashcroft, the word
Cannibal is an “especially powerful and distinctive feature of the rhetoric
of empire”, that far from being a merely “descriptive” term is an
“ontological category… synonymous with the savage, the primitive, the
‘other’ of Europe” (2000, pp.30-1).
In using such discursive construction for describing natives’ customs
and cultural practices, Ghose continues to view them by wearing western
blinkers and unmasks his scanty and insufficient knowledge about his
indigenous culture in particular and East in general. Despite his distance
and dissociation from all ideologies and labels, his epistemological
outlook is laid bare when he (un)wittingly reinforces the stereotypes
about native culture by giving them a stamp of validity.In his analysis of
the particular portrayal of India and Pakistan in Salman Rushdie’s
fictional narratives, Raja (2009) has argued how Rushdie’s works fail to
bridge the gap between east and west as they are replete with gross
generalizations and even mistaken assumptions about the cultural
ambience of East in general and India/Pakistan in particular. Instead of
debunking these myths which are generally associated with east,
Rushdie’s art and narration become instrumental in perpetuating and

3
Said further explains how these stereotypes about natives such as “cudgeled
slave”; “the coarse trafficker in women”; “the thieving merchant” create an
“oriental subject” above and beyond the reality on ground (1978, p.103). To
support his argument, Said criticizes the manner in which Flaubert has given a
ludicrous description of an Egyptian Bazar in Cairo by ‘Orientalizing the Orient
and Oriental’ into fixed categories of lust, corruption and debauchery (1978,
p.49).
 Through A Glass Darkly: The Portrayal Of Indo-Pak Culture In Zulfikar 213

indoctrinating the same myths in western consciousness by “lending”

them “the legitimacy of the voice of a cultural informant”(Raja, 2009,
p.8). Raja further analyses that in the backdrop of the western /
metropolitan critics’ lack of direct knowledge about east and its cultural
norms, “these fictions [with their aura of myth and magic] had now
become my students’ truth: Hence wife beating, polygamy, murder, and
terrorism became the main tropes for them to define the postcolonial
world, and since they read it in their own time, the text alone was not
sufficient in educating them about the cultures of the periphery, it rather
became a site that cemented their previously held stereotypes (2009, p.2,
italics mine).
Moreover, such representations willfully confuse the specific context
of various cultural customs and beliefs of a particular community –
hence failing to appreciate the vital link that the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu elaborates between habit and habitus. In Bourdieu’s
view,certain habits and customs are meaningful in their totality and are
understood if and when they are placed in their specific context. In
confusing the specific nuances of various practices and rituals in the
collective cultural life of his people, Ghose fails to appreciate the mutual
dependency of habit and habitus in constructing a cultural landscape. His
refusal to acknowledge the specific cultural context obstructs his ability
to engage with the crucial task of subverting these stereotypes. Instead he
seems to perpetuate and reinforce them as his cultural portrayal is
heavily based on the western stereotypes about eastern culture with its
alleged backwardness, savagery and primitivism.
The aftermath of such intellectual and discursive representation of a
cultural or social reality is discussed by Said who criticizes the migrant
intellectual for his presentation of the native culture with its so-called
“follies, its corruptions, its hideous problems” (2002, p.100).4 That such
representation of native culture and its norms by migrant intellectual are
neither empty of “western condescension” (Said, 2002, p.102) nor from
the “pressure of western ideals” as they are usually received and

4
Said has launched this critique against V.S.Naipaul and his representation of
East and its cultural norms, for details, see his Bitter Dispatches from the Third
World (2002).
214 Journal of Social Sciences
accepted by academy quite unreflexively.5 The “native informant”, in the
words of Raja “has been appropriated by the metropolitan critic”(2009,
p.9) who will refer and use these literary accounts whenever the
“inconveniences of the Third world are to be attacked” (Said, 2002,
p.103).
The cultural portrayal that emerges out of such discursive accounts is
characteristically simplistic and reductionist as it refuses to account for
the complex historical, ideological and social determinants which
constitute the very bases of human culture. Instead of viewing native
culture with empathy and intimacy, such cultural accounts tend to
colonize and monopolize the subject by refusing to engage in what
Menon has called the “density of argument with a lived community” (in
Chatterjee, 2010, p.3, Introduction). Subsequently, the very possibility of
cross-cultural understanding and knowledge is reduced as the
metropolitan reading public is largely complacent with the way reality is
presented by the so-called insider with his first-hand knowledge about
his native culture. Notwithstanding the high reception of these works
inside academy and their market potential, they neither bridge the gap
between cultures nor do they enhance empathy and understanding
between people of different communities. Instead they crystalize the
subjective outlook of their authors by ‘obliterating’ “any sympathetic
feelings” they had or might have for the world they once belonged to,
and produce “more dependence, self-disgust” and “apathy” among the
wider reading community about the traditional and normative aspects of
their culture (Said, 2002, p.103).
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5
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